Easy Green: Air Your Clean Laundry
If you think about clothes lines and drying your laundry in the great outdoors here in the U.S., you probably think about the Leave It To Beaver days. The good old days. In fact, with suburban sprawl and the need to look “pretty,” many suburban housing associations actually ban clothes lines. Modern clothes dryers may seem so easy, but there is something special about putting sheets on your bed that were dried in the great outdoors. It’s that certain je ne sais quoi.
Technically, I’m not even supposed to have anything up in my backyard. It’s ridiculously nuts. Sure, I don’t necessarily want to see the neighbor’s naughty unmentionables flapping in the wind, but it’s only clothing. I know this is an odd topic in the middle of a cold Chicago winter. If I put any wet laundry out right now, I’d have a stiff, frozen piece of cloth. So we just hang some of it in the basement. Of course I was watching one of my favorite television channels, Current TV. They recently had a pod called “Dirty Laundry” done by an American living in Spain. He talks of how quaint and beautiful it is to see everyone’s laundry. People don’t use dryers like they do here. I can’t remember the last time I saw laundry hanging in someone’s yard (besides my own) in the five years.
Anyway - my point is - if you can, air dry your laundry. I really would like to expand our operations this year and get a better setup to hang more laundry. I know that I’m probably not supposed to, but until someone stops us, we’ll push the envelope. How ludicris is it that you can’t do something so simple that saves a ton of energy? It’s frustrating.
Enjoy the pod!
Well, here in California (where it’s sunny nearly all the time)…in older suburbs people have clothes lines. We Have one, when we don’t do laundry at the laundrymat, we wash clothes in our washer and hang them up outside. Practically everyone on the block has one in some form or another…I think if you get a really nice looking one and hang up nice clothes and maybe put it in a place where it’s not too visible you shouldn’t have a problem until you try to sell the house…lol. Our clothes line is visible from the street all the way in the backyard! The housing development I live in was built in 49′ though and if there was a homeowners association, there isn’t one now, or people severely don’t follow it’s rules anymore. lol. Every house on the tract has it’s own character now, not one looks like the other anymore (can you believe that?), and they all once looked the same aside from being different floorplans. Down with cookie cutter-ness.
Since my fiance and I live in a tiny apartment we’ve always just used the dryer since we really don’t have a place to hang out laundry. But while shopping at Goodwill we found one of the wooden racks for air drying and bought. We may not be able to air dry everything and the rack will have to go in the “dining area” and take up 1/3 of the apartment but we figure it’s worth it in the long run. You can check out what else we are doing on our blog. http://badhuman.wordpress.com
I probably air dry 1/3-1/2 of my laundry as much to protect the clothes as to save energy. I bought a sturdy drying rack at Bed Bath and Beyond that expands to fit a large amount of clothes, but retracts and folds up to store in my 1 br. apt. I tried to find a picture on line, but no luck, sorry. You’ll have to go into BBB to get one.
Hey, thanks for checking out my blog - I’ll have to throw in some of the ingredients you suggested next time I make granola. I started air drying my clothes inside my teeny-tiny 35 square meter apartment a couple months ago and haven’t looked back since. The clothes don’t fade as much, it saves energy, and since we dry the clothes inside the apartment (we don’t have an outside line) it even adds moisture to the air which is nice during the winter.